Saturday, July 6, 2013

Sorry things have been a little on the quiet side in The
Tombs lately. Life unfortunately has an annoying tendency to interfere with
one’s hobbies.

Never fear though! Starting out in Waterlooville in Hampshire on
the south coast of England, in 1979 Look Back in Anger would experience a few
line up changes, including losing the keyboards before anything concrete was
released.

It would be easy to assume that the band took their name after
the 1956 play about a love triangle which gave the world the phrase “angry young men”, but this seems
slightly odd for a female fronted band. Perhaps it would be safer to assume
that the actual source was David Bowie’s
single of the same name (RCA, 1979)?

Things kick off with the Caprice / Mannequin 7”, (LBA, 1981),
swiftly followed by the Foxhunt cassette/7” (Stick It in Your Ear Tapes!, 1982)
whose contact listing for various animal rights groups on the rear would leave
no one in any doubt as to the group’s stance on the subject matter.

A short hiatus follows before the band reappears in 1984 with
the Flowers 7” (Criminal Damage Records) with its title track sounding
curiously like Kim Wilde trying her hand at Goth – not that there’s anything
wrong with that. Kim Wilde happens to be a little guilty pleasure of mine and one of the
first albums I ever bought. Anyone who doesn’t like it can bite me.

Flowers

This brings us to the focus of this post, the Caprice mini
album (or was it an EP?) containing both “Torment”
and “Inamorata” from the Flowers 7”,
but perversely not including the track “Caprice”.

Listening to this, there’s no ignoring the fact that it’s very much a child of
its time. If 80’s alternative was a scent, you’d be able to smell this crew
from the other side of the nightclub.

Unfortunately, Caprice is not an especially coherent album. It’s clear that
Look Back in Anger had two quite different aspects, a relatively poppy side,
and another less accessible one, and they were much the better for it when they
adhered to the former. If we take that view, then tracks like “Executioner” and the rather aggressive “Silent Partner”, tend to pale into
insignificance here in the face of the real stand outs here of “Gray Sky” and “Inamorata”. That last song is interesting here, not only because it’s
substantially longer than the version on the previous single, but also because
it includes a bridge in which the band suddenly break into a snippet of “Flowers”.

Even if listening now, this material sounds curiously dated, it is nevertheless clear that, when on the money, Look Back in Anger remain capable of evoking a deliriously wonderful sense of nostalgia.

Gray Sky

Executioner

Torment

The Caprice album would prove to be the last thing Look Back
in Anger would record before dissolving.

Jim Newby went on to form the curiously named The Fifteenth whose sole release would
be the Andelain 12” (Tanz Records, 1986), with its highlight on the B side being
the surprising and delightfully Duran-Duranesque “Marble Shire” and Zig Zag journalist Barbara Ellen, who may
possibly have been Jim’s girlfriend at the time, gracing the cover.

He followed on with Splashpool, who as far as I
can work out don’t seem to have released anything apart from the video below.
He also appears to have been an occasional collaborator with cover version
terrorists Brian.

Mich also seems to have had a busy year appearing in
Mankinds Audio Development with Rob Hickson and Pete Waddleton of Play Dead
fame on the one-off Sunfeast 12” (Criminal Damage Records, 1984), doing backing
vocals for “Gimmick” on The Cult’s
debut album Dreamtime (Beggars Banquet, 1984), and turning up again a few years
later working with Balaam and the Angel on the She Knows 7” (Virgin, 1986).
Later she would depart for the US, in company of her boyfriend, some chap
called Billy Duffy.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

And so it’s finally out, well, almost. Made Glorious is
one of those things that makes you proud to have been involved in a DIY fund
raising issue through Pledge Music that began something crazy like two years
ago.

I’ll be the first to admit to some hesitation after the
Trinity EP (self-released, 2007) failed to light my fire, but hey, what’s a few
dollars towards helping a genuinely alternative band you really like in an age
when record companies are much more interested in instantaneous shallow pap
like Niki Minaj, Nickelback or that Beiber thing?

Happily, what we have here is indeed glorious; a massive 16 track double album,
including largely new versions of the album preview if you will, the Love will
Kill You EP (self-released, 2011) and a whole heap of new goodies.

This is quite clearly The March Violets of old, and yet they
have unsurprisingly subtly grown over the intervening years. Part of this is undoubtedly
down to advances in technology allowing for vastly superior production, but
also, the material presented here with more varied instrumentation is somehow
more multi-textured than what folks who came to know and love the Violets from
the Botanic Verses compilation (Jungle, 1993) may be used to.

There’s no filler here, all is wonderfully catchy from
the title track “Made Glorious”, “We are all Gods III”, “Tokyo Flow”, “Dress 4 U” and of course, the unspeakably brilliant “Road of Bones”. Other tracks like “Billion 3”, “London’s Drowning” and “2024”
come bearing political subtexts which could have been annoying had they been
delivered in an in-your-face style like anarcho punk bands, say, Crass for
example, but are actually pleasingly subtle.

They’ve lost none of their humour
either, which is very welcome in a genre where many bands are so tediously
po-faced. It’s easy to imagine the serial killer ode “Of Roses” playing as the final titles roll on a particularly black
comedy, and the rollicking “Ramming Speed”
jogs merrily along in a vein not unlike what one might expect from Andy
Prieboy. There’s a moment when things go weirdly electro, but the punch line
quickly becomes apparent when the track listing reveals the song to be “Discoboy Must Die”.

At time of writing, Made Glorious has only been made
available to those who pledged. Very
soon however, it will be available by mail order, initially in a strictly limited 2 CD edition, albeit with different cover art than that shown above.

The Violets have requested that none of the pledgers
upload or distribute their advance copies of Made Glorious, and from what I can
see on Youtube, so far everyone has very graciously complied with the request.
Just to give you a small taste of what you’re in for however, here’s two little
snippets.

We are all Gods (Live in Glasgow 2012, presumably a bootleg, but a very good one)

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….

About Me

A DJ throughout the 90s at numerous Goth night clubs in Perth including The Cell, Dominion and others he was probably far too drunk to remember, largely as a result of his preference to work for bar tabs over cash. Also helped found 6RTR fm's Goth & Industrial showcase Darkwings.
More recent projects include the currently dormant Descent - a small night dedicated to playing genuinely good Goth music both old and new in preference to packing the dance floor with songs everyone had heard 20 million times before. He currently runs a monthly show on Behind the Mirror on 6RTR fm which can be heard on Wednesdays at 11pm WST.
Rumour has it he once masterminded an ill-advised Goth fanzine "Small Pleasures" that in retrospect, he remains profoundly grateful never made it off his desk.